Put in the work after you mess up

There is a concept that I’d like to introduce as we talk about resilience this week, and that is the concept of the emotional bank account. This is a bank account that saves up trust instead of money. You make a deposit into the emotional bank account when you do trust-worthy things, and withdraw when you mess up.

So when there is a BIG mess up, you might go into the negative with the other party whose trust you violated.

There is a simple continuum: Untrustworthy – Neutral – Trustworthy.

Many who mess up think they just need to move from Neutral back to Trustworthy.

Not so. When you make a bad decision, friends, colleagues, family or others might lose enough trust that you go into the negative in the emotional bank account. You are not starting at Neutral; you need to work your way back from Untrustworthy, as painful as it sounds.

Resilient people understand this. When you are prepared to take full ownership of what went wrong, and you are prepared to ask tough questions to learn from it and do better next time, you must also accept that the work you need to do is a little more than just applying a fix and getting back to “normal” as quickly as possible. It might take some time.

Resilient people put in the work after they mess up. They don’t shy away from it.